One thing that's worth remembering is that companies - especially in Silicon Valley - use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other.

If you are an engineering manager looking to make the case for raises for your team members one of the tools you have available is usually an anonymized survey of similar compensation levels from other companies.

You can say things like "this person is a high performer and is being paid 85% of the expected level for this title at other companies nearby - we should bump them up".

Your company may use job titles in a non-standard way, but there's probably an HR document somewhere that attempts to map them to more standard levels in order to make these kinds of comparisons useful.

I don't know how this works in other industries or countries, but I've seen this pattern play out in San Francisco Bay Area tech companies.

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skeeter2020 8 hours ago | parent [-]

>> use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other.

small companies typically go the other way, using titles to make up for concrete remuneration. This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years.

	▲	ryandrake 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years. Another thing I've noticed happening is that if these companies grow into medium sized companies, these OG employees actually become VPs and directors whether they are qualified for these roles or not. Just by virtue of them being there first. I've worked at enough medium sized companies and have seen this at every one of them: "Why is this moron SVP of engineering?" "Well, he was employee number 5 back in the day."
	▲	jghn 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This brings back memories of the candidate who demanded coming in as a high level engineer. Their argument was they were currently a CTO. Of their 2 person company. While they were still in college. And they were only borderline hireable for our entry level role.